


The Unwinding

by tiltedsyllogism



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Arachnophobia, Delusions, Horror, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, Remix, Sort of? - Freeform, Spiders, and not an especially happy one either, look if you read this it's on you, maybe? - Freeform, not a straightforward fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:49:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28444194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiltedsyllogism/pseuds/tiltedsyllogism
Summary: Moriarty is dead. But somehow, he’s still watching. Sherlock is sure of it.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 11
Kudos: 16
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2020





	The Unwinding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DiscordantWords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscordantWords/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Web](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16419110) by [DiscordantWords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscordantWords/pseuds/DiscordantWords). 



> This story is a remix of [discordantwords’](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscordantWords/pseuds/DiscordantWords) excellent, creepy little fic The Web (linked above.) While it's not necessary to read that story first in order to understand this one, this remix will probably be a richer experience if you've read DW's original. (Though maybe don't read it for the first time if it's late at night and you're inclined to be afraid of spiders.)
> 
> Thanks to anarfea for feedback, and to hiddenlacuna for as rigorous a hashing-out as one might ever hope for from a beta. Y'all are both fabulous <3

The lowering sun casts golden-pink scarves of light through the windows of Baker Street, which blend with the amber-gold of the lamps. There are more of them now, a lamp in every corner of the room. Ever since they changed out the drapes and gave a proper cleaning to the corners, the flat holds on to the light of evening a little longer than it used to. Sherlock sits in his chair, basking in the imagined warmth. John emerges from their shared bedroom, carrying the novel he’d left on his bedside table the night before.

"Tea?" he asks, quietly.

Sherlock nods absently, soaks in the sounds of John's puttering in the kitchen. A moment later, John emerges, leaves a mug for Sherlock, takes his own to the chair across the way and settles in to read.

It's a picture postcard of an evening at Baker Street. Sherlock had carried in his heart a picture very like this one during his time away, after Moriarty's death. It has been the slender thread he had clung to during those brief, brutal, fruitless weeks.

Then, a flicker interrupts the steady gold pool of the back lamp. Only a moth -- they'd got into the coat closet below about a month ago, quite careless of all the insecticide -- but still, Sherlock flinches.

Seeing him, John flinches too.

*

"You see," Sherlock explained, "they've been spying on me. The spiders."

John stared, blank-eyed and sallow. He looked even worse than he had a few days ago, when Sherlock appeared on the doorstep of his ugly, ordinary house in Kensal Green.

"Moriarty sent them after me. To stop me from exterminating his network."

"Moriarty..." John barked out a dry, humourless laugh and stared fiercely down at his own hands. "Well. I was about to say he's dead. But then--" slow and dangerous-- "so were you."

The fact that Sherlock had nearly died properly by an assassin's gun three days ago, half a moment after their eyes first met, seemed only to have sharpened John's simmering fury. That was somewhat confusing, as well as unjust. Of course Sherlock hadn't known that Moriarty would have stationed an assassin by John's ugly little house. But then, he ought to have suspected, hadn't he, given what he'd seen the past few weeks? Stupid.

"I realize I have not been... entirely forthcoming, recently," Sherlock admitted.

John scoffed, the rasp of it cutting deep into his thin chest. He had lost nearly a stone in the weeks since Sherlock had leapt from Barts. He clearly also hadn't slept well since the shooting, but the weight loss indicated a deeper and more sustained disturbance. Molly had been right, Sherlock realized, with the chagrin that always accompanied a stupid error and a twist of something else besides. She was a clever girl. Maybe he should have paid more attention.

"And," he continued slowly, "I realize how improbable this sounds."

Improbable wasn't the half of it. A global association of spiders, carrying on Jim Moriarty's work after his death? Sherlock could barely tolerate the fact that he was entertaining so ludicrous an explanation, let alone that he had disclosed it to John. But his own observations rendered any other explanation impossible.

The memories of those observations sent a brush of sensation over Sherlock's skin, like dozens of tiny feet skittering across his skin. He shivered violently, and his wounded chest throbbed. He drew a deep breath. That hurt too, but it was a pain he chose and it was steadying.

"But John." The imploring tone in his voice was humiliating, but Sherlock found that he could not control it. Not when John was finally so close again. "John, I need you to trust me about this." The beat of his damaged heart counted off silent seconds. "Please."

John bit his lip and looked away.

*

Of course Sherlock realized it didn't actually make sense. It was, in point of fact, a phenomenon that contradicted all of one's prior deductions and inferences. So far outside the scope of rational conjecture that he couldn't really fault John for his failure to follow the thread. There was no evidence on record (and Sherlock had looked) of spiders displaying high-level social organization or otherwise behaving in a manner that indicated sentience; still less that they might do so at the direction of a dead criminal mastermind.

But when the impossible had been eliminated, whatever remained -- however improbable -- must be the truth. However remote and absurd that truth may seem, in the light of this golden evening, as they sat together in the sitting room at Baker Street. No, better than old times, Sherlock corrected himself, with a flush of warmth.

Sherlock had not expected John to believe him right away. No sensible person could have been expected to, without solid first-hand evidence -- and John had at that point been so angry at Sherlock that even reasonable evidence might have been too challenging for him to absorb.

But when John had forgiven him, clutched Sherlock's hand in his own and wept and spoken of all the things he had carried in his heart since that false funeral, then Sherlock had hoped. Hoped that with love and forgiveness would come understanding.

John had followed him in haring all over London, in those early days, from the civilian streets and onto the battlefield. He had followed Sherlock into the chemical-haunted mists of Dartmoor, had all but followed him off the roof at Barts and then spent grief-stricken months punishing himself because he hadn’t. John had followed Sherlock down to the bare bones of his own soul, confronting a part of himself he had hardly dared name, past his own rage and grief to the truth at his own core, because he had lost Sherlock once and did not want to lose a moment more. Surely John could follow him one step further, to understand that the man who had haunted them was no man, but a spider at the center of the web.

But even the extraordinary John Watson had limits, Sherlock thought, watching the descending sun paint rose-gold into John's hair. Whenever Sherlock tried to explain how it had been, the fount of spiders from the dumpster in Amsterdam or the hail of tarantulas from the inn ceiling in Belgrade, something in John's eyes went dim, and he turned away.

*

Sherlock had been in his Mind Palace when Molly arrived at the hospital. She was his first visitor, not counting the assassin-nurse who had stopped by to chat as he’d awoken the day before. A flicker of disappointment, which Sherlock abruptly squashed. John was prone to sulking when he felt slighted, but he would surely come to see him in good time. He had to. None of this was worth it otherwise.

"Sherlock," Molly said, when his eyes had opened. She sat forward, the stress dropping from her shoulders. "You came back."

"I came back," he agreed. It was almost laughably straightforward, not something that should require so much cataloguing and rearranging.

"Did you-- why-" she began, and then stopped herself. "Never mind, it doesn't matter."

It didn't matter, or not enough to tell Molly. He was an idiot. These weeks had been a failure. Worse, a kaleidoscopic unravelling. Molly didn't need to know. Nobody needed to know.

They sat a moment in awkward silence. Sherlock wasn't sure what to say to someone like Molly, in this setting. With Mycroft, there was always some form of sniping called for, and with John Sherlock somehow never worried about what to say. But here was Molly, obdurately present. She looked tired and drawn.

"I am grateful," he said. "For your help... before."

Molly ducked her head. "It's all right," she said, fiddling with the hem of her blouse. "So are you back, then? I mean to stay?"

"Yes," he said, as if it were as simple as saying so. Baker Street had not been let to anyone else, Sherlock knew. But he did not much like the idea of moving back there without John. He was suddenly very tired, and wished Molly would leave.

"I'm glad," she declared fiercely.

He looked at her, then.

"It's been--weird. Here. Since."

"Since?"

"Since you left. Died. Whatever."

"Weird how?" He shifted in the narrow bed.

"Well. It's just--just weird. Sort of like being watched. All the time."

Firmly, deliberately, Sherlock brushed a cobweb from the corner of his mental foyer. "I'm sure it's nothing," Sherlock said.

She gave a little embarrassed smile. "Well, maybe it is. It's just--just a feeling I keep having. Uncomfortable, as if someone's in my flat. Or lots of someones. It feels--" she smiled nervously-- "oh it's so silly, but it feels like hundreds of tiny eyes following me everywhere."

Sherlock opened his mouth and then closed it again. The parallels were undeniable, but that did not mean they were significant. It was not helpful to theorize on a selective assortment of facts, he told himself again. Somewhere under all of the muffling exhaustion, a weak little flare of fury sprang up, that Molly should pander (however unknowingly) to a suspicion that Sherlock had been struggling to extinguish.

He shook his head slightly, wincing as the movement sent a bolt of pain through his thorax.

"Sherlock, are you all right?" Molly piped in. "I'm sorry, of course you're not all right. But apart from the gunshot, I mean. You look..." she stopped, swallowed. "Quite awful, actually."

Sherlock clenched his teeth to prevent himself shaking his head. "Fine," he said.

She nodded quickly and dropped her eyes, but then suddenly leaned forward and put one tentative hand on the bed rail. "You will let me know if there's something I can do."

"Yes, yes," Sherlock said impatiently. Of course Molly was of no more use to him today. But that was the sort of comment someone made before leaving, wasn't it? He glanced down with distaste at her hand where it still rested on the bed rail, and was racked with an involuntary shiver.

"Molly, what's that on your arm?"

Molly snatched up her arm and held it close to her chest, so the bite scar was not visible. "It’s nothing. Never mind."

Sherlock pushed himself to sitting, ignoring the pain. "Show me."

Molly swallowed, then held out her arm, forearm up. The scar was deep, and quite ugly. Sherlock winced at the sight, leaned forward. He recognized the aftermath of necrosis. He'd done several studies on the subject.

"It's a spider bite, isn't it," Sherlock said. There was a faint roaring in his ears. He reached out, his fingertips hovering but not quite touching.

"Brown recluse," Molly said softly. She bit her lip, looked away.

He was familiar with the brown recluse. The markings on its back formed the shape of a violin.

"It's nothing," she said. "Just a bit of bad luck, really."

"Molly," said Sherlock, his voice gone hoarse.

"But it did feel deliberate," Molly continued, rubbing absently at the wrist of her injured arm with the other hand. "I know it sounds quite mad. But it felt like a--a message of some kind."

The weight of it was settling into place. He would have to go back into his Mind Palace when she left, move those most horrible of memories from the past few months back out of the dark hallways and back into the room labeled "Moriarty." A room he had only just locked and sealed off--but lightly, insecurely. He had never really believed it was over.

"A message," Sherlock said. "Or a punishment."

Her eyes snapped to his, wide and fearful. With their eyes still locked, and hugging her damaged arm close to herself, she nodded slowly. 

*

Sherlock had of course entertained the notion that he was going mad: that Moriarty had orchestrated some massive, elaborate ploy to drive him out of his wits, or that Sherlock had dreamed it up himself, which was plausible given the circumstances. He was under an unusual degree of stress, exhausted and worn down by unceasing movement while still recovering from his injuries at Barts, and no doubt highly suggestible. A further argument for this possibility was the sudden absence of John, a steadying presence on whom Sherlock had come to rely, even more than he had realized at the time.

Across the sitting room, John reaches up absently and turns the lamp switch another click to brighten it. It casts a golden circle around him, sharpening the darkness of the carpet beyond the reach of that warm light. Sherlock's own island of light is hardly ten feet away, but in the lowering dark of the evening, that space seems to rise up like an impassable gulf.

But ultimately, such an explanation could not be sustained. There were too many signs, too many patterns. The spiders had been everywhere, haunting the corners of every abandoned flat he had squatted in, skittering across every darkened alleyway shortcut. And everywhere, Moriarty's men had found him, as if drawn along by a silent silken thread. Sherlock had ruthlessly analyzed all of his failures to avoid detection, and while a handful of them might plausibly be attributed to some minuscule slip or a stroke of very bad luck, at least as many were absolutely airtight. It defied all logic that they should have found him every time. No other explanation would hold, under scrutiny. As reluctant as he had been to admit it, it was true.

From John's little island of light came the loud flick of a turning page. Interesting. John had grown up loathing the endless crackle of his father's newspaper at the supper table, and was therefore excruciatingly cautious about producing similar noises -- except when a book was sufficiently absorbing, in which moments John forgot his carefulness.

Sherlock has never deceived himself about John’s various limitations, relative to himself. The familiar pity was there as always, but now Sherlock discovered in himself an admixture of envy. Imagine being able to get lost in a book. Sherlock had had that kind of focus, once.

It angered him, as much as anything, to find himself compelled to return again and again to the idea of that endless many-eyed web, skittering feather-light across the surface of any logical construct Sherlock tried to erect in his own defense. Accepting the reality of what he had seen felt like a compromise of his rational faculties. But even worse, it also meant giving into base fear, letting in a darkness that was never going to leave him alone. A less rigorous mind would likely be content to accept the uncertainty and move on, rather than get tangled up in trying to resolve the contradictions. Sherlock did not have that luxury.

And yet it would be bearable--almost bearable--more bearable than otherwise, with John. But John is not with him. Sherlock watches him across the sitting room, head in his book and a thousand kilometers away.

*

She watched, through the scope, as Holmes walked up the path of the ugly little bungalow. The door opened, and she lifted the rifle to her shoulder.

"Wait," said Boss, through the earpiece. "Give them a moment."

The assassin chewed her lip in irritation. Back before he'd fucked off to God-only-knows-where, the old Boss had warned her that his upcoming replacement was a micromanager -- and coming from him, that was saying something. But he hadn't been joking. Mr. Westwood would never have insisted on second-to-second contact for a simple job like this.

"I've got a clean kill shot now," she muttered, an eye on the scope.

"Killing's easy. You know that, surely." The crackle of the earpiece only accented Boss's dry humour. "The point isn't blood, the point is to make it hurt."

On the ground, the target had shifted, and Holmes had stepped halfway into the house.

"Damn, he's blocked my shot," she muttered. "Do you want me to wait, or risk an incomplete? Interior's not accessible from here, and we can't assume he'll come to the door again."

A crackle, and then: "Holmes. A wounding shot. Don't kill him."

"Wound, and not kill?" she repeated back, to make sure she'd got it right. "If I'm going to make a botch of it, I might as well shoot the mark."

"Trust me," said Boss. "This will hurt most, in the end."

*

Sherlock's tea has gone cold. He tosses back the last half of it anyhow, then lets the empty mug drop to the side table.

John starts at the sound, blinking. "I'll just get that."

Though it is possible that Sherlock dropped the mug with the express purpose of drawing John's attention away from his book, this particular response is deeply annoying. There's nothing to fuss over. Of course it's not broken; even cheap pottery can stand to fall three inches onto a wooden table. There's no harm in a mug lying on its side for ten minutes.

John is newly solicitous around Sherlock, now, careful to remove anything he thinks of as an obstacle or an irritant. At first, Sherlock made an effort to bear it with good grace. The gunshot wound in his chest made it necessary, if aggravating, to be fluffed and fussed at and looked after. And Sherlock had supposed that the severity of the wound, compounded by the shock of witnessing it, gave John a reasonably good excuse for the fussing.

But the fussing has continued, though the dressings have long since come off and Sherlock is able to get about pretty well by himself. There had always been an unsettling continuity between John's daily acts of service to an admired friend and the way he insisted, from time to time, on managing Sherlock into some sort of bland palatability. From everything Sherlock had read, he had assumed that their post-reunion transition from friends to lovers would entail a shift more fully toward the former behaviour. But every day John meets him with blank, impersonal solicitousness, as if the flat -- as if all of London -- cannot be trusted not to provoke Sherlock. As if Sherlock himself cannot be trusted.

*

After the fall, Sherlock spent what turned out to be five days on Molly's sofa awaiting travel plans from Mycroft. When the folder of documents finally arrived at the bottom of a fruit basket, Sherlock spent four hours with a pot of tea, committing every drop of information to memory. The exercise left him strangely muzzy-headed, and so it was Molly who did the final round of cleaning and patching-up on his injuries from Barts.

He stared at the wall as she changed out the dressings, affecting disinterest to mask the pain. He would be deep in his Mind Palace right now if he could muster the concentration.

"This cut on your shoulder blade isn't closing properly," Molly said, frowning.

Sherlock could not recall a cut there, but maybe he had missed it in the earlier rounds of self-repair. Or maybe it had slipped his mind in the interim. Both possibilities were frustratingly plausible.

"I'd better stitch it up," she said. Then, wincing apologetically, "it will sting a bit, I'm sorry."

"Oh do get on with it, I'm not a child," Sherlock snapped.

Once she was done, Sherlock reached the opposite hand over to feel the stitches, which were irritatingly just beyond the brush of his finger. It felt strange and uneven. Amateur work, Sherlock thought with a mental sneer.

But Molly was here, not John. Sherlock's preferences had not come into it.

"Don't touch it, and don't pick at it," she chided. "You'll just open it right up again."

A sharp reply rose in his mind, but Sherlock said nothing aloud. Molly had been the one who could help him the way he needed, and who could be trusted to keep silent at all costs, without getting any ideas of her own.

If John were here, he would scold Sherlock for his sharpness. Would, in fact, prod Sherlock to thank Molly. The sound of his voice sprang unbidden into Sherlock's mind, and he closed his eyes at the bittersweet ache of it.

"There you go," Molly said, pressing the last bit of tape onto his forearm. "That's all of them, I think." 

"Molly," Sherlock said haltingly, "I want to... that is... I do realize that you are doing a great deal for me."

Molly dropped her eyes and gave a tiny nod. "I promised I'd help you, didn't I? I always keep my promises."

*

Sherlock stares out the window at the black night. It wasn't the wound in his shoulder acting up, but it might have been. John hadn't asked, though, just swept over and grabbed the mug and taken it to the sink, where he was now industriously washing up under the bright yellow lights of the kitchen.

John had suffered terribly while he was away, Sherlock knew that. It only would have been worse if he had in fact managed to elude the network of spiders, because it would have taken years to eliminate all the traces of Moriarty's human network.

But it would have been better for John, too, that way. Because however beaten or bruised, however broken, the Sherlock Holmes of John's imagination would have remained intact. Though John had had his criticisms, after all. What was it John had called him? A machine? That still stung a little to remember, but it was minor, all told. All part and parcel of the cool, unflappable, unstoppable engine of rational deduction that Sherlock had always been.

Unhappily, Sherlock wishes -- as he often had -- for a crack in his own reasoning, some fatal flaw. A loose thread, he thought, with dour humour. A flash of insight about some humiliating oversight that would, at least, permit him to throw away his conviction, and agree with John -- as he ultimately had, in Dartmoor -- that his own faculties had become compromised.

But he couldn't. Not when he knew so clearly, so certainly. He had seen for himself the webs in every corner of every room he ever found, the skittering shadows on the wall of every alleyway. It was the truth, however improbable, and he could not let it go, whatever the cost.

*

Sherlock’s funeral was day three. Molly, dressed in black, cast an apprehensive look at him on her way out the door. When she returned three hours later, she was red-eyed and tight-lipped and did not look at him at all.

"Mycroft is sending over plans tomorrow," he informed her later that evening, leaning against the kitchen counter with his tea while she did the washing up. She didn't need to know, but the cloud of silence had grown oppressive. “I’ll be leaving the next morning.”

"So that's that," she said quietly. She did not look up.

"Yes." Sherlock watched her face as she scrubbed, pinched brows and tight-pressed lips, and considered that maybe that was not, after all, that.

"Your assistance has been--" his voice trailed off as he searched for the words.

"Sherlock," Molly said, setting down her sponge and shutting off the tap. "Don't do this. Don't--you need to tell John."

Sherlock rearranged. Concern for John, rather than a sense of being slighted or overlooked. Interesting.

"I'm worried about him," she said, finally, when she seemed to realize he had nothing to say. Whatever she saw in his expression made her lips turn down. "About John. I don't want anything to happen to him."

"Neither do I," Sherlock said. He rolled his eyes. "That's why I'm doing this."

"Yes, but he doesn't know that!" she cried. "He doesn't know you're doing anything at all, because he thinks you're dead, he watched you--" Molly took a deep breath. She seemed surprised at her own outburst. "Sherlock, even you can't be so cruel as that. I know you need everyone to think you're dead, but surely John."

"What about John?" Sherlock snapped back. He loathed imprecision. "I'm saving his life, surely that's enough."

Some dark thing shifted in her face. She gave him one cold look and then turned the tap back on, full force. The conversation was clearly over.

Sherlock, watching her through the rising steam, was suddenly grateful that he didn't need to ask her for anything more. Well, other than her continued silence. But Molly could always be counted on for keeping secrets. If he hadn't known she was made of stern stuff, he wouldn't have asked for her help in the first place.

*

"Do you want me to put those away?" Sherlock asks, gesturing toward the dish rack. He had wandered into the kitchen a few minutes after John departed. Even the new, bright lamps helped only so much, and sometimes it seemed they did little more than heighten the gloominess of the dim corners.

"Need to dry first," John says. His voice is even, if a bit curt.

"Good point," Sherlock concedes. He has become careful too, around this newly careful John. Careful of the intermittent undercurrent of anger that’s stronger than Sherlock remembered, and that is aimed at him in a way that it hadn't been before. 

John makes no reply.

"Although it would be an interesting experiment,” Sherlock offers offhandedly, “to see what would happen if we put them away wet."

John closes his eyes. "Roaches," John says sharply. "It would attract roaches." He draws a noisy breath and meets Sherlock's eyes for the first time this evening. "That would be lovely, wouldn't it. Maybe you could make up a new theory." 

Sherlock drops his eyes in consternation. He hadn't realized that John had swung this far back round again. His hand lifts before he can stop it, and he forces it back down again. 

John clenches one fist and then forces his hand flat. “A new version of the experiment, hmm?” He is no longer trying to keep the anger from his voice. 

It had seemed like the worst thing, before, that John should believe Sherlock was losing control of his rational faculties. What was the point of returning to London -- what was the point of anything -- if Sherlock’s star had gone dim in John’s eyes? 

But Sherlock has come to learn, in the last few months, that the worst times are not when John treats Sherlock like a piece of fragile china, incapable of simple reasoning and the most basic mental self-protection. Because at least then, it's still the two of them against the world, the way it always was. 

But not if the spider theory is just a game, a joke at John's expense, another deception. The possibility, once it had occurred to John, had been impossible for John to shake off. 

And this, this is the worst: John believing that Sherlock would _toy_ with him. Even now, after everything. For months, and for no evident purpose except his own cruel, idiotic amusement. 

John has not said anything to Sherlock, but there's no need. Whatever he or anyone else may have thought, Sherlock's deductive abilities are as sharp as ever. It was, therefore blindingly obvious when John began to make more excuses to visit Mrs. Hudson, or to make more social arrangements with Lestrade or Mike Stamford or even Molly Hooper.

John still kisses him, most nights, before they go to sleep. It's more than Sherlock had ever dared hope for, more than he had realized, for so long, that he wanted. And somehow, Sherlock feels as if John is farther away than he has ever been.

*

Molly's lip was nearly bleeding from chewing, but she forced herself to breathe slowly as she stared at Jim Moriarty's shattered face.

She had only a few minutes before Sherlock came in. As much as she had grieved Jim's obsession, she had thought his death would mean the end of divided loyalties. She shook her head angrily. Foolish. She always was a foolish girl.

But Jim... Jim would have had a good heart, if life had been kinder to him. To them.

Sherlock had a good heart, underneath it all. He'd been careless with her, it's true, treating her like he did and then flirting with her only when he wanted something. It had hurt enough, at the time, that when Jim had asked for her help, she had promised readily enough. But then she'd seen how much he loved John. Even if he would never tell him. Even if he would never admit it to himself. That changed things, for Molly--softened her, helped her forgive him for her own broken heart. You can't unsay a promise, but you can find your way through the gaps, when you want to.

She would find a way to manage it all. She would. She took the spider in the jar out of her pocket and laid a tentative finger on her dead brother's lips, nose already wrinkling. She'd never liked spiders, but this would be easy compared to the balancing she would have to do next.

*

John gets into bed, rolls over to the far side, back to Sherlock. No kiss, tonight.

I'm sorry, Sherlock almost says, the way he has almost said it every night for weeks. He did manage it, once, a few days ago. And John had not turned over, had not even moved, but only said "doesn't really matter, does it?"

So Sherlock has kept silent, though his heart burns with it.

"It was always for you," Sherlock says softly.

John does not stir.

The invisible, choking thread around Sherlock's heart pulls tighter.

**Author's Note:**

> If this was your idea of a good time, [I've written a bunch of other remixes, too.](https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=remix&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&pseud_id=tiltedsyllogism&user_id=tiltedsyllogism)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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